A few titles that were once Orion-owned have been released by smaller labels (Slacker and Fanny and Alexander by Criterion, and Kino released Life and Nothing But...). I'd say these are all possible candidates for Criterion.

According to the Rialto catalogue Two or Three Things I Know About Her is coming out on May 27.

Just as an update, this was a mistake which has now been corrected on the Rialto website. They meant to state that The Two of Us will be released on May 27th at Film Forum NYC. Apparently Two or Three Things I Know About Her will not be released until 2006. Meanwhile, Mouchette might be released at the end of this year.

It seems like The Milky Way is the only film missing in action from Criterion at this time. I still wondering if Criterion will release Godzilla too, along with Toho's one-of-these-days release of the film.

Appears as though Rialto has finally scheduled a date to start the theatrical re-release of Mouchette. Film Forumin New York will be showing Mouchette in October (14th-20th), right after they finish screening Pickpocket (which is not a Rialto title).

I have never seen Classe Tous Risques - not through want of trying. It's a crime thriller, pretty much in the great tradition of Becker, Melville, Dassin, etc. It was based on a novel by the great José Giovanni, who also worked on the adaptation. Lino Ventura and Jean-Paul Belmondo star and music is by the legendary Georges Delerue, so we shoud be in safe hands. There was a French DVD, now OOP, I believe, that didn't have English subs.

I saw a press screening of this a week or so ago (my review will go up at cinematical in a few days, if you want to see me gush horribly about Lino Ventura) and was pretty much stunned. It's amazing, and much more than a gangster film, though it is that - for me, it was actually a really sensitive exploration of male relationships. Either way, Ventura is completely incredible in it, and Belmondo is great as well.

The movie's very mellow and downbeat, for the most part, and is done indescribably well. I'm a Melville fanatic, but in my mind this is something entirely different - just see it, if you care at all about French film.

According to Rialto's website, their next two releases are Carole Reed's "The Fallen Idol," which is scheduled for February 10th

Well I never.

Me neither! I'm already looking forward to the eventual release of this on DVD. It's my personal favorite of all of Reed's films. (I even prefer it over The Third Man.) I also think that it's the most intelligent treatment of childhood on film since Zero for Conduct and before Forbidden Games.

Claude Sautet's "Classe Tous Risques" is the kind of French movie that makes you want to throw on your trench coat, light up a cigarette and shoot somebody. Originally released in 1960, it was lost in the frenzy of the Nouvelle Vague, which made its straightforward use of genre look a bit old-fashioned. Back then, a dubbed version (titled "The Big Risk" and distributed by United Artists) played briefly in American theaters, but now, thanks to Rialto Pictures, English speakers can see a handsome restored print with newly translated subtitles. It is worth seeking out, not only because "Classe Tous Risques" represents a missing piece of film history - a link between the great postwar policiers and the brooding 1960's gangster dramas of Jean-Pierre Melville - but because it is a tough and touching exploration of honor and friendship among thieves.

Mr. Sautet, who died in 2000, is better known for delicate psychological dramas like "A Heart in Winter" (1992) and "Nelly and Mr. Arnaud" (1995), which would appear, at first glance, to have little in common with this underworld chronicle. But as the lean, efficiently linear plot unfolds, nuances of feeling and motivation seem to collect between the lines and around the edges of the frame. The story, adapted from a novel by José Giovanni, begins in Milan, where Abel Davos (Lino Ventura), an exiled French mobster, is about to return home with his wife, his two young sons and his partner, Raymond Naldi (Stan Krol). After putting the wife and kids on a train to Ventimiglia, Davos and Naldi commit a robbery on a city street in broad daylight, and then head for France in a series of stolen cars, a bus and a commandeered pleasure boat.

But the jauntiness of this adventure is shadowed by a sense of sadness and fatigue, borne out in a sudden eruption of lethal violence. The heaviness of Davos's situation seems to reside in Mr. Ventura's meaty, rough-hewn face and solid frame. His size and strength make him curiously vulnerable, and before long he finds a perfect foil in the silky, slender person of Jean-Paul Belmondo. Mr. Belmondo, amazingly youthful and on the cusp of international stardom, plays Eric Stark, a freelancer dispatched by Davos's Parisian buddies to escort their long-lost comrade from Nice to Paris.

The sending of a surrogate to fulfill their obligations turns out to be the film's moral crux. Davos's old friends are for various reasons disinclined to risk their own safety to help him, a caution he regards as a mortal betrayal. Stark's instincts are more generous, and he and Davos form a friendship founded on a shared code. Their bond is conveyed through exquisite understatement on the part of both the actors and the director. These are not the kind of guys who go around hugging each other, which makes their evident love all the more poignant. (The manly chastity of this affection is guaranteed by Liliane, an itinerant actress who falls for Stark, and who is played, with luscious irrelevance, by Sandra Milo.)

The relationship of these two men turns the movie, which never departs from the conventions of its genre, toward a rough, matter-of-fact profundity. It ends cleanly, almost with a shrug, but leaves you pondering the nature of loyalty, obligation and revenge. Mr. Ventura and Mr. Belmondo would go on to play tough guys and seducers of various kinds, but there is something especially rare and fine about this collaboration, in which the tough guys, without acknowledging as much, in effect seduce each other.

Sautet usually leaves me cold, but this sounds very interesting. The Fallen Idol and L'Armee des ombres are gold.

Author (Sonate for Jukebox, Hardboiled America, and others) and Editor-in-Chief of the Library of America Geoffrey O'Brien returns, this time to talk about the classic Carol Reed film, The Fallen Idol.